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Tuesday, 28 January 2014

New sanctions figures out on in February

The number of unemployed people in Brighton
being punished for not finding a job is going up, despite the number of people
out of work going down, figures uncovered by Hit the Donkey, can reveal.

Job Centre staff across Sussex ordered the
removal of people’s benefits on more than 7,000 occasions between October 2012
and June 2013, the latest period for which figures are available from the
Department for Work and Pensions.

(Ed - Up-to-date figures are due to be
released by the DWP in February. Watch this space for an update).

The department’s increased focus on
attaching ‘conditions’ to people’s unemployment benefit resulted in the number
of sanctions dished out, by Brighton Job Centre, leap by more than 400% in a
single month between October and November 2012. Similar increases occurred at
job centres elsewhere in the area and the level of sanctions has stayed roughly
stable ever since, the figures show.

Brighton Pavillion MP, Caroline Lucas, has previously
called on the coalition and

Labour opposition, who are both committed
to sanctions, to agree to a proper review after listening to residents detail a
catalogue of bizarre and often callous justifications for issuing sanctions in
the first place.

Speaking in Parliament in March last year she told the story of a
58-year-old female constituent, who had been unemployed for seven months and told
me she would be sanctioned because she could not afford the cost of a 21-mile
round trip to work for a charity shop in Worthing. The woman offered to work in
the same shop in Brighton, but the Job Centre would not allow it.

Lesley Ashley (Donkey passim), 27, a Chef who lives between
Brighton and London, was sanctioned at Christmas last year (2012). As a consequence of his
Employment Support Allowance (ESA) being cut, his housing benefit was cut as
well. The job centre did not inform him that the sanction could affect his
housing benefit too.

In
and out of zero-hours contract work Leslie was sanctioned after he didn’t
receive a letter from his Work Programme provider A4E and, as a result, missed
an appointment.

After
six weeks the job centre agreed to overturn the sanction, he got his housing
benefit restored and had his arrears cleared.

He
said: “The sanction had been applied wrongly, which I told them, but although it
was not my fault I was warned ‘don’t to do it again’.”